Hyderabadi Khabar

End Of Year activities including contract renewals are keeping me busy at work. Apologies for a late post..

N'uf about me, let me blabber about a few of my observations.. Most of the observations are critical of something or the other.. believe me, it makes living in Hyderabad a lot more fun.. whats life without some <>

• Comedy show .. Was at a party recently where Ash Chandler was performing.. His performance was ok but.. the jokes seem to be a straight out of the Comedy Central shows that I was glued to during my days in the US. Not sure what he was trying to do, but first he tried to be Seinfeld, then he tried to be a mimicry artist [ trying to impersonate Clinton and Bush ;( ], and in between he tried a few Sinatra and James Brown tunes. Overall I thought he was a better Sinatra impersonator than a comedian.
• Event management... seems to be the in-thing now. Every birthday party, engagement and misc event is being organized by EM's. They are very professional, young and hip crowd, as we have seen in movies before. The bigger challenge is that they keep walking around the event with headsets and bluetooth devices as if they are some sort of secret service entourage for the president of the US. I attended a recent event at HyderMahal in Grand Kakatiya and the EM's were going beyond what would be considered acceptable behaviour in the party. On the same note.. tollywood actors are now entering this business with the recent one being Raja.
• Democrats and Republicans should outsource their strategy to Hyderabad. Politics here are at their best[ pun intended ]. TDP tries to find fault with everything that the cong govt does and then the cong govt some how finds a document or news clipping with naidu claiming credit for the same in the past... What do you do when your opponent tries to nail you .. just add their assets into the same investigation.. TDP recently got the high court to investigate land fraud around ORR [ Cong's project ], .. Next day Cong govt included the land around Airport [ TDP project ] to the same dispute. Do you think TDP or Cong will pursue this any further ?
• Real Estate is sizzling and the values continue to soar. I have recently seen residential areas in jubilee hills sell for 80k a yard and some for as low as 38k per yard [ Not sure why such a huge difference.. may be one of them is an NRI and the other a localite or it could be the vaastu factor ].
• Commercial properties are hot now a days.. recently saw an ad for a commercial space in madhapur, nothing great but a 1500 sqft floor in the 2nd floor of a building. It was sold in 2 hours for 90 Laks.. Buyers were rushing in to give an advance to a shocked owner and... Guess what, the same owner listed the 3rd floor of the same sqft for a whopping 1.1 Cr and that sold within a day. I still cannot understand why the 3rd floor would sell for a premium..
  
• Malaysian township, a joint venture of APHB and IJM of malaysia booked at around Rs 1000/sqft almost 2 years ago was being hyped a lot. So a friend and I decided to take a look inside and this turned out to be the "Height of Optimism" of Hyderabadi's. This is just a glorified KPHB built as high rises, the quality, finish and layouts of the apartments and duplexes were so bad that we didnt have to bother much about anything else. This one is now going for anywhere between 2500 to 3000 and I would recommend you buy somewhere else instead of this one. You can get a decent construction quality at Gacchibowli for the same amount.
  
• Kitty parties .. This was my first run-in with this concept... Some how I was always under this impression that its some sort of a ladies party with an "adult" angle. [ sorry ladies, I really thought that it was.. based on the word kitty ;-) ]. Now its clear, Have to thank my buddy who explained what it ... Kitty only refers to a pooling of contributions and nothing else. Now that I know its like any other do's you would attend in Hyderabad, I look forward to attending some more of these.
  
• Stock Market.. I have heard it all .. Buy Low Sell High ? .. Look at the long term ? . Well I got bit once during the dot com bust.. so let me end it there .. ;-)

BTW, I am itching to write about the VAASTU [ feng-shui like concept] fever/craze in this city.. people are going nuts about it, but its getting late.. and my 15 minutes are up.. see you next week